


Escaping backward to perceive

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Jed finds out, Pawnshop, Romance, is probably what Mary secretly thinks, none of this would have happened if Hale could operate worth a damn, pawning your wedding ring is always a big deal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 07:17:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17914301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Once, she'd thrown herself in front a man waving a gun. This was not so different.





	Escaping backward to perceive

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Dust is the only secret](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17889650) by [middlemarch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch). 



Emma hadn’t meant any harm, Mary knew that. It should have been a consolation and it was, but not a terribly great one.

“Nurse Mary! Whatever happened to your ring?” Emma had exclaimed as she and Mary were sorting through the instruments Jed wanted for the surgery on the boy from Tennessee. Jed, standing across the table, looked up suddenly, his dark gaze alert and inquisitive.

“My ring?” Mary repeated. Stupidly, as it turned out. She could have said _never you mind_ or _I put it away somewhere safe_ , both of which were truth of a sort, and Emma and Jed might have taken her at her word.

“Your wedding ring. It often catches the light, so pretty,” Emma said.

“I, oh. I took it off,” Mary stumbled. Why hadn’t she thought of an answer before?

“Why? Oh, I beg your pardon, Nurse Mary, I’m prying, how impolite,” Emma asked, blushing. Jed was still looking very intently, a half-smile on his lips, his readiness to share his amusement evident.

“I pawned it,” Mary blurted out. Emma gasped, a lovely little gust of horrified dismay that Henry Hopkins would have thrilled to hear. Jed was not so circumspect.

“Dear Lord! You went to a filthy pawnshop, Mary? You’re a Baroness, damn it,” he exclaimed. Emma gasped again at the obscenity, truly horrified by a gentleman cursing at a lady, the earth tipped off its axis.

“I hardly think now is the time. Private Campbell cannot wait,” Mary said, striving to keep her desperation from her tone. To sound the staid, mild Head Nurse she was intended to be.

“I shan’t forget,” Jed warned her.

“I don’t expect you will,” Mary said.

“Nurse Mary?” Emma asked, the question meaning _Shall I stay? Are you well? I’m terribly sorry_.

“Fetch me the chloroform, Nurse Green, and we can proceed,” Mary said, ducking her head to avoid Jed’s glare.

 

“Where is your ring, Mary? Your wedding ring, if you need a clarification to serve as a reminder?” Jed asked a few hours later, when they were alone despite Mary’s better judgment.

“I explained, I pawned it,” Mary said, gazing at the fire behind Jed as if the flames were more fascinating than anything. The boy was well, would make a full recovery, a small relief. The fire was bright and had been burning long enough to take the chill from the room—that was another.

“You explained nothing, madam. You made a statement any gentlewoman would have been ashamed to utter in polite company,” Jed retorted, his voice cold, angry, and underneath, baffled. 

“I needed the money,” Mary said.

“For what?”

“For the telegrams, for the families of the men that are dying,” Mary said. “My funds have been exhausted, primarily by Dr. Hale’s endeavors, but I cannot sleep at night, thinking of a woman waiting for word.”

“Why didn’t you—Christ, Mary, why didn’t you come to me? Why did you sell your ring? Am I such a monster, that you wouldn’t ask me?” Jed cried. “That you would go somewhere so beneath you? A Baroness?”

“I couldn’t,” she said.

“You couldn’t? Why? You’d rather sell your ring than ask me for help? I have my salary and an income from my family, I wouldn’t have noticed the difference, if I’d given you what you needed.”

“It wouldn’t have been right. Appropriate. You’re not—” she broke off.

“I’m not what? Your husband. God help me, I know that. I know, Mary,” he said, anguished. “You were not my wife when you helped me before, when you made me give up the needle.”

“I was the Head Nurse,” she said.

“I wasn’t a patient here. You weren’t my Head Nurse. You—when I called for you in the night, I only called your name, Mary, I didn’t cry out for a nurse,” Jed said. He’d laid his head in her lap and wept while she stroked his hair, reciting psalms when he wept harder at the hymns she’d sung first.

“I could not take money from you. If it were discovered—I’d be—I couldn’t take money from you, surely you can see that, Jedediah,” she said.

“That I can understand. But why didn’t you ask? Why didn’t you come to me, ask for my help, whatever help I could give? It would have been whatever you wanted—unless you didn’t want your ring any longer.”

“No!” Mary thought of how it had felt to draw the ring from her finger, how she’d felt dizzy, heard Gustav’s dear low voice, _liebe Mareike, Mareike_.

“You’ll never stop loving him. And you’ll never love me, trust me,” Jed said flatly. “I shouldn’t have presumed.”

Mary stepped closer to Jed before she could think; the space between them was only enough to define the word. She breached it with her bare hand, pressed against his heart. She drew in a breath and tasted the scent of his cologne in her mouth. He was warm and she leaned in, rested her cheek against his breast for a moment, a blissful, endless, thoughtless moment.

“You’re wrong. I was wrong. I loved my husband—and I lost him. I love him still. It does not preclude me from loving again,” Mary said. She moved back, the distance necessary to look directly at his face. “I should have spoken to you. I’ve grown used to managing on my own, to making do.”

“You let Samuel help you. Matron, virtuous Mr. Hopkins, even little Emma, you let them help you,” Jed replied, still bitter. But she heard more in his voice, the suppressed trembling of being hurt, rejected.

“It’s easier with them,” Mary said.

“Of course, I’m difficult. Impossible,” he said. He said it so seriously, she was not tempted to laugh.

“It’s easier because my relationship to each of them is simpler. Because what I feel for them, however great, is so much less than what I feel for you,” she explained. She started to step away but Jed caught at her hands, holding them together in his own.

“If she hadn’t said anything, I can’t help wondering how long it would have taken me to notice—and that troubles me. I can’t help wondering how I would have reacted if you’d come to me, if I would have made some jibe at Hale first before answering your worry,” Jed said. “I don’t like to consider the truth—that I might have failed you again.”

“We cannot agonize over might-have-beens, not when the world has agony enough for us every day, Jedediah,” Mary said, suddenly exhausted. He saw it and dropped her hands so he could take her in his arms.

“You’re right. You’re right,” he said, almost crooning the words. “Just rest now, let me give you that, and tomorrow, we will make arrangements. For the telegrams and your ring.”

“And for us,” she said softly. She felt him kiss the top of her head, graze his lips against her temple.

“For us,” he repeated.

**Author's Note:**

> Looky here, a sequel on Oscar Night when the Tumblr re-watch is postponed! And Jed having feels all over the place and Emma almost certainly wanting to sink into the earth itself...
> 
> Title is from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
